Bhagwati and Panagariya have argued for phasing out MNREGA in favour of cash transfers. In this article, Abreu et al. contend that the argument is based on inflating the costs of the programme and deflating the benefits. While they do not claim that all is well with MNREGA, they believe it needs better governance, not slow suffocation.

Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, hereafter BP, have argued for phasing out the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) in favour of cash transfers. It’s surprising that two eminent economists have chosen to make a case based on prior beliefs rather than on the available evidence. A survey by one of us of the empirical literature on MNREGA can be found here.

BP’s main point is that MNREGA is an inefficient "instrument of shifting income to the poor". They even claim that it costs five rupees to transfer one rupee to MNREGA workers.

Their argument: consider a worker who currently earns Rs. 80 a day in the private sector but decides to work on MNREGA for Rs. 130 instead. She earns an extra Rs. 50, but this costs the government Rs. 248: Rs. 130 in wages, Rs. 56 in material (assuming a material-labour ratio of 30-70), and Rs. 62 in leakages (assuming 25% of expenditure is embezzled).

This argument is misleading.

Inflating costs, deflating benefits

The first concern is whether potential MNREGA workers have alternative gainful employment. Often they don´t, as MNREGA work is provided mainly in the slack season. This is especially true for women — more than half of all MNREGA workers. With involuntary unemployment, the question of “currently earning Rs. 80 a day in the private sector” does not arise: so the income gain is Rs. 130, not Rs. 50.

If, for the sake of argument, workers do currently earn Rs. 80, it is only true that the gain for the MNREGA worker is Rs. 50. However, what matters is the impact on income, direct and indirect, for all workers. In this scenario, there will typically be a wage increase (though not "by leaps and bounds", as attributed by BP to mysterious propagandists), which benefits all employed workers. This is possible even when MNREGA employment is wholly concentrated in the slack season, if higher slack earnings tighten peak labour supply. Even small increases in the market wage translate into huge aggregate benefits, given the size of the labour force under consideration. In short, only extreme assumptions — unspecified by BP — would yield a net gain as dismally low as they claim. The possible cost-raising impact of wage rise for poor landless workers that some people worry about is far surpassed by the inflationary consequeces of budget deficits to subsidise rich farmers.

Second, BP ignore non-transfer benefits, starting with MNREGA assets. Rural roads, soil conservation, flood control, groundwater recharge and land improvement projects may not shine as brightly as the smart cities BP so enthusiastically endorse, but they do contribute to India´s development. A recent study of over 4,000 MNREGA assets across Maharashtra, by the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, found that most of them are valued by local residents. BP assume they are all useless. They also ignore the evidence on other benefits: for instance, empowerment of women who work in large numbers, reduction in distress migration and impact on schooling achievements (these latter achievements have been recently estimated to be as large as that of the much-lauded conditional cash transfers in Latin America).

In other words, BP´s argument is based on inflating the costs of MNREGA and deflating the benefits. This biased accounting spills over to their espousal of cash transfers: how a cash transfer system will identify the poor is glossed over, as is the inherent self-selection advantage of MNREGA (clearly only the most needy are willing to do hard manual work), which after all provides a conditional cash transfer. If BP intend cash transfers to be universal, there would be enormous leakages in terms of transfers to the well-off.

BP ought to be well aware that all districts in India have a large number of poor. Yet, they support the government proposal to restrict it for 200 poorest districts. This is because they believe that MNREGA is a wasteful scheme without any redeeming merit; as an income-transferring scheme it is inefficient and its main claim to fame - ‘self-selection’ - seems to be inoperative. As evidence of the latter, they point out that a large poor state like Uttar Pradesh (UP) generates a lower percentage of total MNREGA employment than smaller and richer states like Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. It is important to realise here that ‘self-selection’ can generate the ‘demand’ but not the ‘supply’ of employment. Indeed, there is excess, unmet demand for these schemes; the government typically does not have enough resources or administrative capability to meet that demand. National Sample Survey (NSS) data for 2009-10 shows that in UP only 16% of rural households got work, even though 35% wanted to work. This is not surprising: in poor areas governance is also poor. That calls for improving governance, not scuttling the programme, and after all, the new government has been elected on the promise of improving governance. The proposed restriction to poorest districts will also have to grapple with this governance problem. For India as a whole, among the poorest two quintiles of rural households, over 40% of those who want MNREGA employment did not get it. Even in the richer states such as Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat, 31%, 20% and 38% (respectively) want work under MNREGA. These poor and underemployed are no less deserving of employment simply because they happen to live in a relatively richer district or state.

MNREGA needs better design and implementation, not slow suffocation

Shortcomings of MNREGA implementation have certainly been reported: these include delays in wage payments, benami payments, unmet work requests and material irregularities. Yet numerous careful studies based on independent household survey data have shown significant benefits in terms of income security for the most vulnerable. MNREGA provides employment to some 50 million rural households, affecting the lives of up to 250 million individuals. When more than 90% of the workforce is informal and lacks access to social security, this is a critical intervention. Leakage rates remain substantial, but they are declining and no higher than in many other subsidy programmes.

We share BP´s lament about "the folly of embracing substantial spending programmes unmatched by revenues", but not their astonishing inference that "this alone justifies the decision to confine NREGA to 200 poorest districts". To put matters in perspective, consider estimates by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP_ of total “non-merit” subsidies (implicit and explicit, Centre and states) to the better-off in India: about 9% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), over 20 times the expenditure on MNREGA (less than 0.4% of GDP). BP would be doing us all a service, therefore, by taking their lament elsewhere. Surely, there are better ways of ensuring fiscal responsibility than to deprive millions of workers of an important (and sometimes crucial) source of livelihood.

We do not claim that all is well with MNREGA. The programme needs better design and implementation, not slow suffocation. And certainly the public debate is not well-served by facile attacks uninformed by the facts.

A shorter version of this article has appeared in Times of India.

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I have been associated with training of deputy collectors for organizing work for EGS since 1977-78.As a student of Prof Dandekar I had participated many such workshops and actual works together with my colleagues in labor movement. I have also been associated with many movements in Ahmednagar to take up specific works in PWD and irrigation projects that constituted 'shelf of projects'. (eg. Wambori Chari in Shreerampur taluka)
Prof. Dandekar was the real architect of this scheme even though it was officially attributed to V.S. Page. (see Dandekar's Poverty in India 1969)All of these founders were seriously re-considering the alternative of form like land army due to several organisational difficulties faced in implementation of the scheme. These are fairly documented in the reports of Committee of legisaltive assembly and council.Many of the deficiencies reported in the recent studies by economists such as Martin Ravallion are mostly rediscovering the wheel well known in Maharashtra experiences.
It needs to be recognized that lower level of administration such as gram-panchayat is even more feeble and ill-equipped to handle the schemes of such nature.It is therefore necessary to reconsider the generalized model as tried earlier in UPA regime including blanket budgetary provisioning. Maharashtra had tagged tax called 'professional tax' and it had to reconsidered and de-link it with working of EGS!! DUE TO EITHER ORGANISATIONAL INABILITY AS WELL AS APATHY\UNWILLINGNESS Maharashtra could not ever effectively use it as anti-poverty scheme. It remained an enlarged version of scarcity relief program and effective only in drought prone regions that too when ocal MLA was keen to mobilize the works and attendance.
I am surprised that economists seem to ignore the way policy actually works with institutions on ground and keep preaching blindly as many votaries of MNRGEA have been!

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